Only Shadows – Fight Milk

Hailing from Nuneaton, England, an alternative rock quartet Only Shadows released their long awaited new single “Fight Milk” today. It has been quite sometime since they released their last single “Be Still”. You would start wondering what more the band could do after such a superb tune.

Their new single “Fight Milk” is edgy, authentic, heavy, rocky and even bigger than ever, and it shows their capability and talent in music.

This week, even at short notice, Only Shadows kindly took some time out of their busy schedule to be interviewed by me. Here it is;

Hi guys! Great to have you today. First of all, could you introduce yourselves?

Hi there! We are Nick, Moff, Riley & Paul. We are Only Shadows.

This must be a boring question for you, but I’m always interested! How did you all meet up and become a band?

We’ve all been playing in bands for years around our home town & we kind of over the years realised that all 4 of us had similar music tastes. Over time we all came together and settled on working together…. FOREVER.

Nice! How did you decide on Only Shadows as your band name?

It was a strange one, Moff mentioned he watched a documentary on Chernobyl where the narrator said something like ‘Only Shadows remained’ and he mentioned it. We kinda liked it because at the time we were going through a rough patch where we would turn up to gigs and be put on even before doors opened! So, it was also kind of how we were feeling, just the shadows in the corner that no one was taking notice of. We still feel like that today almost.

Thanks for sharing your story.
Who are your influences? Does everyone listen to similar music?

Yeah, we all listen to similar ish stuff. It’s all generally guitar music that we’re big fans of. However we like all different shapes and sizes within that kind of realm. Our big influences on Only Shadows has probably been the likes of Queens of The Stone Age, Kings of Leon, Biffy Clyro & The Killers. They all have a big sound and we like that kind of big balls out arena rock and we don’t care if that’s not a cool thing to say, it sounds huge!

Cool or not cool, but your sound is big, big enough for an arena!
How do you go about writing your songs?

Usually Nick or Moff will write the skeleton of the song, so a melody and lyrics with some chords or maybe some kind of riff. Then we take it from there. It really depends on the song though, for example Fight Milk all started from one riff Moff played in practice, but Nick went away and made a whole melody for it so that worked the completely opposite way round. With the new stuff we are releasing, we feel like we have stopped writing what we think we should write, and we are just doing what we love.

You are just about to release your new single “Fight Milk”. How have you been since you released “Be Still”?

Pretty much since the end of our first headline tour last year, it’s been the hardest period of our lives we have ever had to deal with. Personally, and as a band. We have had false promises, near break ups & some personal life things going on as well.

We weren’t sure if we’d ever come back to release any more music again. On that basis, this was the only song we could come back with.

Whatever happened, it’s great you to be back with the superb song! How would you describe this song?

It’s a huge suck pucker punch to the face. We think a lot of people will be surprised when they listen to it. It’s much heavier than anything we’ve done before, but it basically summarises our attitude on our music now. We are doing what we like and that’s it, end of discussion. We were writing for people at the start of the year and we’re glad we woke up and dodged that bullet.

Great to hear that you are now yourself and bringing awesome music.I believe “Fight Milk” will be released digitally. Where can we find the song?

That’s correct! All your usual places – Spotify, Apple Music etc etc. We will release in physically at some point, but it will be attached to an EP or Album.

Brilliant! I’m so excited about the release! You must be very excited too!

As we mentioned we thought this day would maybe never come, so trust me we are excited. We are also going to savour this moment massively, because we are so so proud of it. We cannot wait for people to hopefully discover it!

I heard that you are going on tour. Am I right? Tell us about it!
Maybe … more details to follow soon.

Okay. You’ve mentioned about the physical release of this single with an EP or album. Are we expecting to hear it soon?

We have more singles in the pipe line, definitely another one very soon after this one. And then two more early 2018.

Is there anything else you would like to say?

Just a huge thank you to everyone who stuck with us for the last year, we haven’t been touring or releasing music for about a year now, so the fact people are still interacting with us is almost embarrassing on our behalf because we don’t deserve such incredible support.